Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Bridging the Gap: Supergravity from Superstrings

Dr. Subhroneel Chakrabarti

Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences

The last decade has seen unprecedented advances in formulating the spacetime action of superstring theory. These advances have provided a rigorous basis for many fundamental aspects of superstring theory, such as
unitarity, background independence, and UV finiteness, to name a few.
Despite such advances, an explicit connection to low-energy effective
action remains elusive. While at a formal level, we should be able to
recover supergravity from superstring theory, I will argue in this talk
that there must be two crucial improvements that are necessary before such an explicit connection can be established. One improvement concerns understanding boundary terms in string theory better, and the other concerns rewriting the supergravity action as more “stringy.” I will discuss how we made some concrete progress in both of these directions, and at the heart of both of these improvements lies a better understanding of self-dual field strengths in string theory and quantum field theory.